File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-13.154, message 72


Date: 11 Nov 96 21:49:07 EST
From: robert scheetz <76550.1064-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: sex-ism


Recently Masterpiece Theatre ran a production of Arthur Miller's
"Broken Glass." 
The fictional setting is '39 Brooklyn; the characters are a middle-aged
middle-class jewish couple. At the beginning of the play the woman suffers an
hysterical paralysis after reading the newspaper report on 
"kristal nacht".  The action then consists in the unraveling
the etiology of this hysteria...thru the mediation of a priapic
Jewish doctor.
     
The husband, pathetically insecure and commensurately abject, does
weasel-work for a WASP owned realty firm, struggling to maintain
the household in middle-class dignity.  During the course of the play,
he gets fired: on account of a racial stereotype and the
insecurity/over-eagerness arising from his socio-economic circumstance.

Simultaneously, the wife cum doctor are uncovering her hatred-
for/fear-of her husband.  She sees him (1) having denied her a
preferred life as a "business woman" by getting her with child
(and for the 20 yrs since has refused sexual affection), and 
(2) identical with the nazi brutes ( for breaking the glass of her
virginity).  The while, tho paralyzed, she aggressively lusts after
the doctor.

The husband vehemently resists the psychoanalytic approach...exposing his own
self-loathing, and recognition that she wants him dead.  He dies from an
heart-attack and she gets out of her wheel-chair.

Miller is clearly presenting his view of the contemporary "woman's
issue".  The working man, for all his tireless and selfless exertions, is
thoroughly isolated and aleinated; despised and exploited by capital and even
his own mate; ends in self-loathing and despair. She, on the other hand, focuses
her considerable emotional strength into her factitious history of oppression,
...destroys and betrays him to consumate bourgeois aspirations.



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